Dream Tropes Wiki/So Bad It's Horrible: Voice Acting
There are games that are simply unplayable and some anime and western cartoons that are downright unwatchable. But don't worry, (most of) these titles are safe for playing and viewing. But probably not safe for listening to. Whether it's sleep-inducing boredom or massive ear-grating, these games are best played with the Mute function readily available, and these animes and Western 'toons best watched with a subtitle track. Compare with Macekre and Cut-and-Paste Translation. Contrast with Superlative Dubbing. Examples Anime English * The PBS Europe dub of Tokyo Mew Mew season 2. It was recorded in Gothenburg, Sweden using North American and British expats and a couple of English-speaking Swedes. It's described as either this, Hong Kong Dub, "Blind Idiot Translation", or a Translation Train Wreck, due to using the Fueian dub of that season as the source. And the voice acting does not help either. This can be justified in that some of the voice actors were American, Canadian, and British college students studying in Sweden, whilst the guy providing Ryô/Elliot's voice (see below) and some other voices was a high school student on a foreign exchange program, and all of them combined had little-to-no experience in acting at all. The rest of the voice actors were Europop session singers who spoke with thick Swedish accents away from the microphone, who like the students had no professional acting experience, and (shockingly) professional North American and British actors living in Gothenburg at the time (one of them being (yes, that Lenore Zann), who voiced Bu-Ling/Kikki and a couple minor roles). ** Cafe Mew Mew is downright called a "maid cafe" on several occasions, which almost never gets brought up in other dubs. His voice actor also gave the cafe's owner Ryô Shirogane (called by his 4Kids name Elliot Grant in this dub) a bad Hugh Heffner imitation of a voice to further the dub's weird obsession with telling the audience Cafe Mew Mew's that type of cafe. Live-Action TV * The Latin American Spanish dub of Between the Lions was recorded in Colombia and ranges from So Okay It's Average to So Bad It's Good to just downright awful depending on the episode: ** The cast signing "A Sad Book" at the end of "A King and His Hawk". The dub turned it from a Tear Jerker moment into a laugh fest due to how badly it was dubbed (i.e. lots of annoying reverb on the voices and at times the chorus is out of sync). Production/Dubbing Companies * Anything dubbed in French in Ërëpë ranged from So Okay, It's Average (Between the Lions, Eto Rangers, Muka Muka Paradise, Shima Shima Tora no Shimajirō, KochiKame, Qin's Moon), to So Bad It's Good (Monster Jam Heroes, Monster Jam), to really ear-grating (many WWE things, and before that the projects of the WWF and WCW) until very recently when the dub of Kamisama Minarai: Himitsu no Cocotama began improving a lot of things wrong with French dubbing there (by the way, Monster Jam and the WWE stuff are still/now So Bad It's Good). ** Regarding the WWE... *** John Cena's Memetic Mutation of a intro had the immortal yelled line "AND HIS NAME IS JOHN CENA!" become the bored-sounding "Et il s'appelle John Cena." And his name is pronounced John See-nyah, at least according to the dubbers. **** Even worse is "WELL THAT'S WHAT THE UNDERTAKER SAID TO JOHN CENA!" becoming the sounding dead inside "C'est ce que Le Homme Funéraire a dit à John Cena." *** Hulk Hogan's original voice actor Marco Petit made the Hulkster sound like a demented Russian Communist leader. Thankfully averted with his second voice actor François-Xavier Pistorio, a Franco-Belgian living in Ërëpë at the time, who at least tried to sound like him (Pistorio's return to his native coincided with the Hulkster getting dropped from the WWE for obvious reasons, and when Hulk Hogan returned in 2018, Xavier decided to record his dialogue via headphones from his home studio) ** And Monster Jam... ugh... *** In the TNN era.... good lord. Dennis Anderson sounded like they picked a bored farmer off the street (Aymard Le Borgne says he took inspiration from his dad, a farmer originally from rural , for the voice of Dennis), Tom Meents sounds like a snob (Donatien Brodeur, his French V.A., is memetic in the Francophone world for this), Brian Barthel sounds like a hair metal singer if they scream-talked (Girish Tripuraneni blames this on the artistic director asking him to imagine what his French voice would sound like), but those are the main three bad voices of the dub as there's more over-the-top voices than bad voices. * Not even Brazilian Portuguese dubbing is safe... ** For a time in the late 1990's and early 2000's, some companies would commission Brazilian Portuguese dubs in of all places - where they were done by Brazilians who lived there. Most of the dub actors were either experienced Brazilian dubbers who moved to find and/or take new roles, amateur Brazilian actors who had a tendency of not controlling their accents, and/or natives of who couldn't keep their ubiquitous European Portuguese accents from bleeding through the character voices. These dubs ranged from So Okay, It's Average (Silverwing, Pupsquad, Nova Orbis 4: Death Race) to So Bad, It's Good (The Secret World of Benjamin Bear, Hoze Houndz) to really awful (Gloria's House, SBT's dub of Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat). The practice has since died down as only Technic Heroes projects, some PBS series, and some of 's pornographic flicks get Brazilian Portuguese dubs in L.A. nowadays. *** The Sagwa dub. With almost 30 different characters (counting one-time characters and recurring characters), there were only 9 voice actors (5 females and 4 males) assigned to voice all of them. ** Similar to Los Angeles, Brasília was pretty controversial in the Brazilian Portuguese dubbing community. The dubs of Magical Doremi and Magical Doremi Sharp were considered So Bad It's Horrible by the fanbase so much that Sato Company moved the dubbing to Sao Paulo for Motto! Magical Doremi, and the same went for Arthur when the Brazilian Portuguese dubbing was moved there for Seasons 8-12 due to labour issues (the dubbing was moved back to Rio de Janeiro for Season 13 onwards (but at a different studio, being Magic Dub Brazil instead of Herbert Richers) as a result of the fans' outrage over the poor quality of the dub of those seasons). Needless to say, they only dubbed a few more series before disappearing from the voice acting industry... for a while, in 2016 Toei Animation commissioned a redub of Lady Lady in Brasília (the original Rio de Janeiro dubbing's master tapes were rumored to have been lost). The end result started to become a meme among the fandom mere days after Crunchyroll released the first episode of the redub. * Polish dubs have suffered through this too: ** Until recently, almost anything dubbed into Polish in Gdańsk was from being So Bad It's Good (You're Under Arrest, Pretty Cure, Bleach, KochiKame, Death Note) to really, really bad (the awful attempt at a redub of One Piece is why TVP chose to continue their Warsaw-based in-house dub (which was based off the infamous 4Kids dub at first and initially only covered the episodes 4Kids dubbed into English) to mixed reactions). ** Similarly, most Polish dubs recorded in Oświęcim were pretty awful to hear (with exceptions such as Cyborg Kuro-chan, Voltes V, Sgt. Frog, and some animated stuff). ** There was a few series and films dubbed into Polish in London, England (think of this as being the European equivalent to the shows dubbed into Latin Spanish in Miami) and all of them just really didn't show in any quality whatsoever. The awful dub of Red Riding Hood cemented it's status as tween girl bait harder. Category:Dream Fiction Wiki Category:Tropes